You saw a broken girl
Eyes wary
Feet swift.
I saw a dangerous girl
Eyes calling
Feet daring.
They saw a cunning girl
Eyes lying
Feet sneaking
You saw a broken girl
And remembered
Yourself.
Broken girl February 13, 2013
interviews & changing times September 27, 2012
Today a group of my students were interviewed for an upcoming documentary about living in a small town. It was interesting to hear their feedback after the experience. They wondered if the interviewer was trying too hard to ‘connect with the youth of today’ by “dropping f-bombs in every sentence” and telling them that she and her friends had taken acid in the 90s. They weren’t impressed.
In the staff room the other day, we were commenting about the kids in the smoke pit. At our school, it is an area about eight feet square, marked by cement barricades a couple of feet high off to the side of our entry, just outside of the parking lot (and therefore, presumably not technically ‘on school grounds’). There are maybe a dozen kids who hang out there off and on over the course of the day, though I’ve never seen more than six at any one time. There are around five hundred students at our school. The teachers were discussing how ‘once upon a time’ the smoke pit was packed, and it was full of cool kids. Now, the kids in the smoke pit are the losers, generally looked at with disdain by the other kids.
I can remember teaching in Prince George, where probably a hundred kids stood in minus twenty, being cool, and smoking. Once, they watched a moose wander past, and then get shot by conservation officers. The smoking area was always lively and crowded, murdered moose, not withstanding.
Not these days. It seems that kids are getting the message about healthy living. They smoke less than their parents and grand-parents. Since according to experts in the workshops attended by my ex-social worker spouse, the real ‘gateway drug’ is tobacco, does this decrease of activity at the smoke pit mean kids are less likely to graduate to harder drugs, and therefore less likely to find themselves popping acid by the train tracks like the interviewer, who’d attended this school a decade ago?
I don’t know, but I hope so. I’m really happy they weren’t impressed by her stories and foul language. Whoever says youth are getting worse isn’t keeping their eyes open. Personally, I like what I see.
home March 27, 2012
While we were travelling this Spring Break, my husband had an epiphany: you can live anywhere. This is old news for exchange students who quickly discover a new meaning for home fairly soon in their exchange year.
It doesn’t take long to feel so comfortable in your new life that you can hardly remember the old. When it’s time to return, you are torn between two worlds. Home is two places.
But really, home isn’t about the place, it’s about the people.
“Home is where the heart is”
the old adage says, and it’s true.
Young love February 2, 2012
This is the second entry in a section called an “Alpha-biography.” The exercise is to work through the alphabet, commenting on a word that connects somehow to your world. My students are doing this in English 9 this semester, and I am modelling it by creating my own alpha-biography. For myself, I will be focusing on how I am interpreting, synthesizing and contemplating the Greek/Roman gods as I’ve been exploring them in the process of crafting the Grace Awakening series. (I’m working backwards, so that in the blog they’ll eventually appear A-Z instead of Z-A, as they end up ordered by time).
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Young Love:
Sometimes I feel like young love coloured my entire world. I am not alone. I speak to a lot of women who are very nostalgic about the first person to whom they opened their heart. Some had negative experiences, I suppose, but I seem to meet a lot of people whose first love set them on a course of self-respect and happiness. I hope that means the negative experiences are fewer than the positive ones. Perhaps it’s just that with the span of years, one begins to find the positives, even if they hadn’t been noted previously?
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I think a good young love is one that remains a fond memory throughout your life. If you take the issues and troubles, and learn from them, future relationships can be stronger. It can become a fuel for creative endeavours, like perhaps a novel series…
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Nostalgia can be a snare though, and if you build up a young love into impossible heights, a current love that must be worked around children, mortgage and bills, can seem as if it can’t measure up. Sometimes we idealize romance from the time when we didn’t have responsibilities, and forget that maturity requires change.
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There is nothing like the intensity of a new love, young or old. Awakening passions make everyone young when they’re first in love. I remember giggling phone calls from a senior lady, a widow, soon after she accepted a marriage proposal. Her giddy joy was no less than the girls in the college dorm. Love is a happy thing, whenever it occurs, but the small space in our hearts that is occupied by that first love remains through the years, forever young and precious.
young voices April 27, 2011
I’m feeling hopeful that things are changing.
The Powers That Be don’t try to attract the youth vote, because they say youth don’t vote. I’m a little confused about that, because I voted when I was a youth, as did my friends. My students all seem very excited about the possibility of voting as they leave high school. So what happens? What makes them drop out of the voting process?
On Facebook right now there is a status floating around that goes, “Out of 23.6 million electors in the last election, only 5.2 million voted for Harper’s Conservatives. That’s 22% of eligible voters, and 16.2% of the total population. There are 5.65 million Canadians aged 18-29. In the past, this age group has voted so little that politicians don’t bother with them. If all of Canada’s youth voted, they would rock the whole political system!”
I didn’t check the facts before I reposted it, but I like the message. The youth have power, if they choose to use it.
Somewhere else I heard, “You wouldn’t let your grandparents choose your music, why do you let them choose your government?” 😉 I like that one, too. It appeals to that rebellious streak in me.
I decided to conduct a little poll on Facebook. Most of my Facebook friends are former or current students, so I asked, “Are you voting in the federal election?” Over 84% of respondants said either yes or that they would if they could. That’s a positive situation that doesn’t seem to echo what the government believes. Of course, my highly scientific poll was a rather small sample (13 total) so perhaps it is meaningless. I choose to believe it shows that within my circle of influence, at least, young people want to have a voice.
We all need to contribute to the exercise of democracy.
Over the years I think I have voted for every party from Reform to Green. I tend to study the candidates and choose the one that seems most intelligent and well spoken, as opposed to the one who is most likely to have his/her party form the government. My husband doesn’t think this is very strategic, but I try to believe in the power of my one vote.
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Voting is an exercise in hope. We trust that we will have a government that listens to us and makes wise decisions. Most of the time, we’re pretty lucky, compared to most places in the world. I like to think that’s because we’re watchful. Young people on the other side of the world are dying these days to get the right to have the government of their choice. I hope our young people take advantage of their franchise, and don’t let their grandparents make the decisions without their contribution.
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Shawn L. Bird 
on being a teen when your birthday says you’re not November 11, 2012
Tags: high, school, teens, writing, YA, young adult, youth
I was just reading a blog post by a writer who was pondering the complications of writing from the narrative perspective of a 16 year old girl. Here are my thoughts about writing as a teen, when one is actually years or even decades past the teen years.
It’s been a few decades since my own high school graduation, but I am lucky. I write for teens, I am with teens all day long, and I never grew up (this means that I actually gave birth to children who are older than I am). I have a unique perspective on the life of the average teen, and access to them. I watch, listen, and absorb what I can in the hallways of the high schools where I teach . I hear about the latest vocabulary, music, games, movies, and books. At the same time, I am no longer a teen, despite not having grown up, so I’m not really in the club. Then again, I wasn’t in the club when I was actually a teen, either. That’s not such an uncommon scenario.
Many things haven’t changed much.
There are the kids who party. There are the jocks. There are the kids who escape their troubles (real or imagined) with substance abuse, with music, art, writing, mechanics or with academic excellence. There are the kids who are motivated and going far. There are the kids who don’t have a lot going for them, and don’t have big dreams. There are enthusiastic kids. There are depressed kids.
Teens are a snap shot of society, though in a time of striving for identity, they are inclined to extremes now, just like they were then.
If you’re writing as a teen in the present, the biggest change in modern teen life compared to life as a teen in the 60s, 70s or 80s is that the ubiquitous cell phone must be part of the action. Cell phones are umbili for social survival for teens today. They require constant connection like The Borg. It’s quite a fascinating thing to observe, especially when the paradox of feeling ‘different’ creates the fundamental paradox: connected and outside simultaneously. That’s the nature of being a teen today.
The most important things remain the same. They still want to change the world. Many still believe, rightly, that they can. That optimism is also an essential component of youth, and the one I like the best.
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Here I am at Hallowe’en with some of the people who make me happy to get up and drive to work each day, my Acting class. Can you find me? 🙂
NaNoWriMo Day 11: 1100 words (Total 15,000)
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